Google Not Relying On College Degrees

You see, businesses use a college degree as a signaling mechanism. By finishing college, you get that credential which indicates to the business you are worthy of looking at. Because of this, most companies have reduced HR departments. Essentially they have outsourced some of the job of finding employees to the university system. I think this relationship is what is keeping universities in demand. I wrote about this last year. If You Give it Away for Free, Is it Worth Anything?

Students know they can’t get into certain fields without a degree, even if they know a lot about the field. With the vast amount of material on the Internet, we are raising a new generation of young people who will have more diverse skills but still have to have that credential. So what if this changes?

After years of looking at the data, Google has found that things like college GPAs and transcripts are almost worthless in hiring. Following these revelations, the company is hiring more and more people who never even went to college.

They go on to say that up to 14% of the personnel in Google’s engineering teams never went to college. That number has been trending upward the last few years. Why it this? Simply because information is freely available now and people who can teach themselves a valuable skill can become self motivating, adaptive employees. We will see this trend accelerate as skyrocketing tuition cause young people to find other alternatives to a college degree.